It's always nice to review a decent heartfelt short indie flick.
Thus coming your reading way via Severed Cinema is a little
nutshell of tension called Ivy. It's the latest baby from
Itai Guberman, an Australian fella who's behind a series of
short movies which were more in the thriller category, yet were
apparently accepted by the horror community.

Ivy
(which is currently doing the festival circuit and holds a fair
few awards) is the first more direct horror by Itai, and since
he's full on deep putting together his first feature film, which
is also a horror, hopefully it will be his direction for the
future cause he's certainly a man with storytelling skills.

Our main lad, Rick, appears to have watched his world fall into
jagged pieces. He's a mess, his girl has gone, and everything
seems so empty like the bottles around his room. He eats without
appetite and wanders around with dead eyes.

ÂCanned food. Aren't you sick of it yet?Â says a voice. ÂCanned
beans, canned cans.Â It's a man in a black suit smiling
across the room. ÂLooks like you ran out of alcohol. C'mon
Rick, it's been a few weeks now, you need to snap out of it.Â

Rick heads to the toilet and a female voice utters through the
door, ÂIsn't it enough you won't leave the apartment, now
you're holed up in the bathroom?Â He claims he has a
condition, to which this lady says it's a coincidence that Ivy
left and this condition began.

Are these people real? And why is it wherever Rick goes in his
small world, there's a cockroach? There's also a girl who used
to be very close to him that arrives to talk to him about the
situation he's in. They are all there to support him and shake
him from the rut he's allowed himself to collapse into. Rick
could be quite simply losing his mind whilst imprisoned within a
small world he feels safe.

Or could there be a problem outside the door to his apartment?

Ivy
plays like a character driven steady quick thriller for the most
part, then intelligently swings itself around to present the
viewer with a show stopping twist. Look, it's not original,
however, the way it is built up, but thanks goes to Dan Shaked's
nice low-key performance which oozes a hidden tension
throughout, and it gleefully provides a slam-in-the-guts bloody
finale.

Ivy
prides itself on being paced and well written. It doesn't matter
whether your film is low budget or a mega huge superhero CGI
budget, the key still lies in the people on the screen and the
writer, regardless Â unless you're a young kid that follows the
crowd.

So, following on from that, aside from the above mentioned
excellent Dan, everybody pays their dues in their parts, keeping
the mystery up to the bitter end as to who these characters
really are.Ivy is the correct length for a short chiller,
however, here's the news Â it's part of a bigger and grander
film which is currently being produced. I won't say anything
about the theme because that may give out a spoiler to
sharp-brained Severed readers as to how Ivyconcludes. I
can totally understand why it has garnered so many supporters
and hopefully we'll see a lot more from Itai very soon.